What I mean is, I wanted to live my life/but I didn't want to do what I had to do/to go on, which was: to go back.

And look! look! look! I think those little fish

better make
up and dash themselves away

from the
hopeless future that is

bulging toward
them

And probably,

if they don’t
waste time

looking for
an easier world,

they can do
it.

Mary Oliver,
from “Dogfish”

"I Wanted to Know, Whoever I Was, I Was Alive For a Little While"

I started drinking again in June, after more
than a year sans booze, and after six months sans booze before that. And I
stopped drinking again in September. I guess some of us need to remind ourselves: "he
wasn’t an honorable man the first time you dated, and he’s even less honorable now." Because now he knows. He knows he’s got you by the collar, or the hem. He knows you’re weak. He knows you’re
a sucker for desperation.

So I started drinking again in
June – as a test – it was research, see? – and I drank maybe three, maybe four
times that month. (I could verify those stats; I kept a calendar.) In July, I drank, oh,
I don’t know, five times in July. And probably six times in August. And I’d
guess eight or nine times in September.

However, with great disappointment, each time I drank, I ended up feeling guilty. Whether I
had a sip of Coppola’s Claret, or “a few glasses” of whatever, I just felt
shady. And worse, there was no thrill to accompany the transgression. I didn’t
feel a slight snarl or cackle at the fact I was doing something which had
become, for me, taboo; something verboten; something no longer personally (or socially) acceptable. (If you stop doing something, for a period, and then start doing it
again, people will bat an eye.) So, no, there was no thrill. There was only the
feeling of belatedness, like I really was stepping into the same river twice.

The thing is, I’m pretty good at employing defense
mechanisms, so I had no problem conflating this feeling of disappointment with
something else. This feeling wasn't disappointment, I decided, it was simply an internalized judgment handed down to
me by our puritanical society of nitwits. “I don’t really feel bad. I just
THINK I should feel bad.” I also tried intellectualizing the situation. “The
thing is, I’m a woman, OK? Living within the shackles of a patriarchal society –
a society that shuns all sign of women enjoying themselves!” And then there was
straight up denial. “I don’t think I had three glasses of the Sauv Blanc. Just
one… large one.”

In the short span of my newly leased
drinking career, the cops were never called, the cell door never slammed shut,
the stomach was never pumped, voices were never raised, the car was never
operated post-imbibing more than two drinks, and I never even missed a day of
work.

But! Here's the truth. I did miss half a day.

It was the end of September, a Friday, the day after my
thirty-third birthday. I had made merry with four girlfriends and it had felt
wonderful. I was back in my zone, as it were, sitting at a table with four
other women, laughing and squawking about jobs, books, relationships, music,
movies, pets--whatever. We’d gone to a fun restaurant, ordered interesting wine
and tapas (you can say tapas now, without qualification, BTW) and we’d shared
intimate details about our lives – the kind of details that usually get
imparted over wine, as opposed to over lunch from the Korean truck or Jimmy Johns. After dinner we walked to
the apartment of one of the ladies to have another drink before heading to a
dive bar. At the apartment, I sat at a table with an old friend, someone who I hadn’t
seen in a while. We gossiped and reconnected and confided in one another and I literally
felt like I’d been plugged back in. I'd spent so much time becoming an expert on Law and Order, I forgot what it was like to be out of the house at 11 p.m., trading secrets, holding hands, and just -- glowing.

“My
cure for drinking was isolation. I would get up, go to work, come home, watch
TV, and go to bed. It got to the point where I couldn’t remember anything good
that had ever happened. I couldn’t imagine anything good ever happening in the
future. Life had shrunk down to an endless, awful now.” From “Flood with
Feeling”

One of the toughest things about early sobriety
is figuring out how to create or cultivate these moments outside of the bottle.
Even if you’re game, it’s hard to duplicate that special, secret, elusive intimacy
that drinking seems to create – and with such little effort. The drink does all
the work. You get to bask in the endorphins and the physical arousal and just,
enjoy. Without the tonic, you need to work for it. You need to work to
get there, and even if you get there, if the people you’re with are drinking, it doesn’t feel exactly
mutual. But look who’s complaining… that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m just
trying to say, I was sitting in a room full of girlfriends and wine and music
and I was feeling like a miniature Christmas tree.

“Evenings
we drank with the best of them: lawyers, writers, media types, everyone vying
to tell the best stories, which of course got funnier and funnier the more we
drank and the later it got. When I drank, the fear evaporated and I became
articulate and apparently very, very funny—or so they said. Years later I drank so much that I was no
longer funny. But at the time, the drinks and the stories and the camaraderie
were as wonderful as I was witty. We would get home to sleep by one or two in
the morning, and the next day we would be up early to start all over again. The
fortitude and resilience of youth made us invincible.” From “The Perpetual Quest”

At some point we made the move to the bar.
I knew it was a questionable decision, but the thing about five drinks is it
renders you less capable of making sound decisions. So I went and got a seat
right at the bar and ordered a beer. I didn’t partake in any of the shots (for which
I gave myself enormous credit) and I didn’t even finish my beer. Instead I called
my husband and basically uttered: come get me now. By the time he arrived to
collect me, I was barely able to twirl out of the bar into the front seat of
the Hyundai Elantra without taking out a pedestrian, a potted plant, and a side-view
mirror.

The next morning I teetered into the
bathroom and ran a toothbrush across my teeth. Oh no. (Vom.) I retreated to the
bedroom and sent a quick message to work saying I’d be in, but I’d be late.
Doctor appointment, or something. I thrashed in bed for a while with my
tortured mind before making the monumental decision to move to the couch. I
snapped on the television and looked for something equal parts cheery and
innocuous. (For the record, during a particularly bad hangover in 2007 I watched
“What About Bob?” four times in one day. And during a not so bad hangover, I
watched ten minutes of Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcaraldo” before puking into the
nearest convenience store plastic bag. So, this is all to say, choice of
programma matters, a lot.) I landed on Groundhog Day (clearly Bill Murray has
the cheery/innocuous market cornered) and quickly resumed unconsciousness. For
about an hour. I was up, I was out, I was up, I was out, I was up, out, up,
out. “What the fuck!” I screamed, “is wrong with me?!?”

I got up, drank a glass of seltzer, felt
ill, sat down, got in the shower, felt ill, got out, sat down, got dressed,
felt ill, and was about to leave the house when
I realized: oh shit, I need to blow dry my hair. I can't show up at
work with wet hair. They think I’ve been out all morning at the doctor,
dentist, or whoever. (I considered telling them I’d dropped by the gym
after the appointment and taken a quick shower, but I couldn’t bear extending
the charade.) Blow drying my hair that morning/afternoon felt like a trek
half-way up Mount Everest, or like carrying a couch up a winding trinity
staircase. Basically, it felt wrong, painful, and thankless. When I was
finished and on my way out the door, I caught eyes with the dog. Bobo. He
looked at me skeptically. I tossed him a greenie treat and was on my way. Out on the
street, inhaling fresh air, and crunching leaves beneath my feet, I anticipated feeling relieved or re-energized. But I didn't. I felt like a human failure.

Somehow I made it through a half day at work. (Basically I sat in
my office and watched old episodes of the late great reality television show:
Stylista.) When the mythical bell rang, I dashed to the street to meet my husband (we
work at the same university; his job is fancy; mine is not.) We’d planned to go
out to eat at our favorite haunt: the Nordstrom Café in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
(try not to be jealous) and although all I wanted was to escape to my sick bed,
I didn’t want to break the plan. I didn’t want him to know anything was amiss,
that I’d drank too much and felt like ass. No, I wanted him to think that
everything was under control!

“The
surprise to me is the fact that I didn’t know that they knew my drinking had
gotten out of control. That is where we are really fooled. We think we can
drink to excess without anyone’s knowing it. Everyone knows it. The only one we
are fooling is ourselves. We rationalize and excuse our conduct beyond all
reason.” From “It Might Have Been Worse”

“So,” he said, as we walked to the car, “are
you still up for Salad Niçoise?”

“Uh, yeah!” I uttered with some off version
of enthusiasm.

“I was thinking you might just want to head
home and relax, lie down.”

“What the heck are you talkin’ bout?” I
demurred. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”

“OK, great!” he said.

And we were off.

Once we were seated in the taupe booths,
beneath the dimmed lights, looking out the panel windows across the endless parking
lot, I realized I was in a pickle. I was still feeling ill and wasn’t sure I
could choke down Haricot Vert and hardboiled egg. What to do? Tell him how ill I
felt? Or scarf down the green beans and force a smile like my life depended on
it? Before I could say, or not say, anything, he addressed me.

“You know, when you came through the front
door last night, you almost stepped on Bobo.”

I forked a rosemary potato. “What? I did?”

“Do you remember?”

Hmm. No. I didn’t remember much after
exiting the bar, actually, but I was quite sure nothing untoward had happened. Was this
some sort of a trick? (Spoken like a true booze hound.)

“What happened, exactly?”

“You walked in ahead of me and you weren’t
looking where you were going and Bobo yelped and ran to his cage.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awful.”

“Well, he’s all right. I mean you just
tripped over him a little.”

“Yeah, but…”

We finished our dinner and traipsed through
the shoe section of Nordstrom (a vile, vile, Godforsaken place) then traversed the parking lot and re-entered our automobile.

“Do you still want to go to the Container
Store?” I asked.

“I can’t do that to you,” he said, kissing
me on the cheek. “Not in your condition.”

I settled back into my seat and didn’t
utter a syllable of protest.

So that might've been it. But no. I drank once more after that night. At a Bad
Plus concert just two days later. I had two and a half beers at the show. IPA's
if you must know. I went with a girlfriend, someone who enjoys drinking,
someone who I don’t feel bad drinking around. We met my husband and his friend
there. They were drinking when we arrived. (My husband can have two Manhattans
sans ill effects and bullshit and life-altering problems. Why can some people imbibe
without calamity and some people can’t? I don’t know, but I know thems the
facts.)

When we were leaving the jazz club, I
stopped to tell the bass player something, something like “thanks for playing
Lost of Love.” He actually responded and we had a conversation for a few
minutes. I realized that if I’d been a little more drunk I would have been
flirting with him. I just do that after too many drinks. It’s the same reflex
as when the doctor takes the hammer to your knee. This realization depressed
me.

“For
ten years through college and graduate school interspersed with jobs, I drank
periodically, so it was easy enough to think that I was a social drinker.
Looking back, I see that alcohol helped me construct an image of myself as a sophisticated
metropolitan woman, diminishing my feelings of being a backward country girl.” From
“Because I’m an Alcoholic”

That night I stayed up until four in the
morning drinking takeout beer with my husband’s friend. At first it was all
four of us: me, my husband, my friend, and his friend. But my girlfriend had
passed out mid-convo and banged her head against our glass coffee table. And my
husband just isn’t a rager, so he’d gone upstairs to bed.

Me and this guy though.

We share something.

It's not a romantic thing, not sexual or anything. It’s the kind of thing that a few years ago
I would have called a magic connection, or a wordless bond, or simply a special
shared something. But today I call it what it is: a mutual affection for
drinking.

I actually drank him under the table that
night. He passed out mid-conversation, as well (I guess it was a theme that
night, or any night when you're hanging out with binge drinking friends) and he sort of slid under the coffee table. I sat in the living room by
myself for a while after that. I mean, his body was still there, but I had no
one to talk to. It was late, very late, and I was lonely. The beer had made me
excited at first, then maudlin, and now just lonely. I knew Sunday would be
rough – there’d be no escape from that. And I knew the week would be rough, and
the month, and the year, and I worried about that.

When I crawled into bed my husband stirred
and I had a feeling he’d been awake the whole time, but I decided just to
snuggle in and not say anything. In my mind I said the Lord’s Prayer and SA TA
NA MA over and over and practiced belly breathing… until I was asleep. I didn’t know that was
going to be my last experiment with drinking. I didn’t know I was going to have
to face the fact that drinking offered me nothing anymore. Just like a toxic
relationship, I had no idea that night was goodbye. Again.

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About Me

Can somebody tell me now who is this terrorist Those girls that smile kindly then rip your life to pieces? Can somebody tell me now am I alone with this? This little pill in my hand and with this secret kiss Am I alone in this...